Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Ruth Rendell
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Afterword
Copyright
‘Love and death,’ said Chief Inspector Wexford. ‘Those were the only two sensational things that ever happened to Margaret Parsons.’
No one believed Mr Parsons’ fears for his missing wife. Until two days later she was discovered in the woods, her face swollen and her clothes damply clinging to her lifeless body.
With no useful witnesses and a victim known only for her mundane life, Chief Inspector Wexford has just one clue: a lipstick found at the scene.
To find the killer, Wexford must first discover a motive. Because what he can’t understand is how such an unassuming woman became the victim of such a passionate and violent crime.
COLLECTED SHORT STORIES
COLLECTED STORIES 2
WEXFORD: AN OMNIBUS
THE SECOND WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THE THIRD WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THE FOURTH WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THE FIFTH WEXFORD OMNIBUS
THREE CASES FOR CHIEF INSPECTOR WEXFORD
THE RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS
THE SECOND RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS
THE THIRD RUTH RENDELL OMNIBUS
FROM DOON WITH DEATH
A NEW LEASE OF DEATH
WOLF TO THE SLAUGHTER
THE BEST MAN TO DIE
A GUILTY THING SURPRISED
NO MORE DYING THEN
MURDER BEING ONCE DONE
SOME LIE AND SOME DIE
SHAKE HANDS FOR EVER
A SLEEPING LIFE
PUT ON BY CUNNING
THE SPEAKER OF MANDARIN
AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS
THE VEILED ONE
KISSING THE GUNNER’S DAUGHTER
SIMISOLA
ROAD RAGE
HARM DONE
THE BABES IN THE WOOD
END IN TEARS
NOT IN THE FLESH
THE MONSTER IN THE BOX
THE FALLEN CURTAIN
MEANS OF EVIL
THE FEVER TREE
THE NEW GIRL FRIEND
THE COPPER PEACOCK
BLOOD LINES
PIRANHA TO SCURFY
HEARTSTONES
THE THIEF
RUTH RENDELL’S SUFFOLK
RUTH RENDELL’S ANTHOLOGY OF THE MURDEROUS MIND
TO FEAR A PAINTED DEVIL
VANITY DIES HARD
THE SECRET HOUSE OF DEATH
ONE ACROSS, TWO DOWN
THE FACE OF TRESPASS
A DEMON IN MY VIEW
A JUDGEMENT IN STONE
MAKE DEATH LOVE ME
THE LAKE OF DARKNESS
MASTER OF THE MOOR
THE KILLING DOLL
THE TREE OF HANDS
LIVE FLESH
TALKING TO STRANGE MEN
THE BRIDESMAID
GOING WRONG
THE CROCODILE BIRD
THE KEYS TO THE STREET
A SIGHT FOR SORE EYES
ADAM AND EVE AND PINCH ME
THE ROTTWEILER
THIRTEEN STEPS DOWN
THE WATER’S LOVELY
PORTOBELLO
For Don
The verses at the beginning of each chapter and the inscriptions in Minna’s books all appear in
The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.
From Doon With Death was my first published book. I had written two others, one of which a publisher saw, rather liked and asked me if I had done anything else. What I had done was a detective story. I wrote it for fun, to see if I could, and also because I had what I thought was a good and somewhat daring plot. It necessarily had to have an investigating officer and thus Chief Inspector Wexford was born.
If only he had been born in 1964 I would not, later, have had to deal with the problem of a detective always too old for his job. But in that year when From Doon With Death was first published I had no idea it would have a sequel, that Wexford would become popular, have a multitude of readers and appear on television. To me it was a one-off and the next book I wrote was crime fiction but not a detective story.
Crime and detection and mystery fiction was at that time emerging, thanks to such great writers as Patricia Highsmith and Josephine Tey, from the rigid boundaries set by the whodunnit. Gradually ‘mysteries’, to use the now universal American term, were losing the body-in-the-library aspect, the cast of stereotypical characters, the gathering together of suspects just before the end, and, after an unexpected twist, the final shocking surprise. From Doon With Death has twists and surprises but I think it has characters that might be met with in ‘mainstream’ fiction and a plot that deals with a woman in love with another woman. It may have been these things that brought it some small success, publication in America and the start of translation of my books into European languages.
There was, of course, mystery and suspense. I thought I didn’t know how to create suspense. In fact, I had never thought much about it. But I found that I could. At any rate, publishers and reviewers told me that I could, and now I think that suspense is an indispensable element not only in crime but in all fiction. What else but wondering what will happen next keeps the reader turning the page? What else keeps the reader unwilling to put the book down?
From Doon With Death starts with a missing woman. She is a housewife as are most of the female characters. This was 1964. It was the men who were the doctors and dentists and police officers and lawyers and and businessmen. The town these people lived in was in Sussex and, though calling it Kingsmarkham, I based it on Midhurst where I had lived for a time as a child. I had just been on holiday in Ireland and the name of my chief inspector might just as easily have been Waterford but I chose to call him Wexford. I liked the sound of it better.
He started as rather a tough cop. Later on, when he made many reappearances, that changed. If I was going to live with this man, I wanted him to be more literate, more liberal, kindlier, more sensitive. I was determined not to let him become one of those detectives who have failed marriages, live in a tiny run-down flat, drink too much and are bitter and morose. Wexford had to have a happy domestic life and we have a foretaste of this in his first case. We see him as, I hope, a likeable man but one who does not suffer fools gladly, a man who, twenty years later, George Baker was to recreate on the screen. Wexford I described as ugly but George transformed him into a handsome fine-looking man with a slight Sussex accent and it is in this guise that my readers see him. He was always, on paper or film, big and tall and with an ongoing weight problem.
Margaret Parsons, the murdered woman, could not exist today. Only thirty years old, she is religious, a lay preacher, deeply respectable, house-proud and old-fashioned even in 1964. Her husband gives her five pounds a week housekeeping money. She is childless. Her murder seems motiveless. What harm has she ever done? What pain has she caused? She has no friends unless the mysterious Doon – a man? – is a friend. What they have in common may be a love of Victorian poetry, with a quotation from which I prefaced each chapter. Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Swinburne all permeate the book. Much of this wistful sentimental writing had, when it was written in the nineteenth century, a romantic appeal. Now it expresses to us passionate longing but an almost incomprehensible sexual frustration as well. And it is this that From Doon With Death is about: not only the suffering of a woman denied the satisfaction of her love for another woman but also the suppression of even admitting that such a love could exist.
Fifty years later, just as Margaret Parsons is an anachronism, so her would-be lover must be looked on as outdated. Today, she would just be a woman with different sexual tastes from the majority of her friends and neighbours, accepted by all but the bigoted, no longer even very interesting. Probably she would be living with another woman, very likely in a civil partnership. She would never have married, though she might well have had children.
A book of this kind could not be written today. Manners, speech, social life and the pace of it, have changed beyond belief. Fifty years old, it was the cradle of Wexford, the introduction to readers of Kingsmarkham, grandparents’ country, when there were still screens of elm trees and hedgerows dividing the fields, when women knitted and made their own clothes and the changeover to decimal currency was still some years in the future.
Those who are reading From Doon With Death for the first time may do well to see it as an historical novel, as distantly in the past as that Victorian poetry.
Ruth Rendell
March 2014
I was a late convert to crime fiction. As a teenager, I liked the thrillers of Alistair MacLean, Frederick Forsyth and Robert Ludlum, but I couldn’t ‘get’ whodunnits. My sister, a fan of Agatha Christie, loaned me a few, but I failed to empathise with English village life, filled as it seemed to be with genteel detectives investigating poisonings and bludgeonings in the billiard room or rectory. In my mid-twenties, however, I found myself actually attempting to write a contemporary crime novel set in Edinburgh. That book, Knots and Crosses, was published in 1987, and in the same year I picked up the paperback of Ruth Rendell’s most recent novel, Live Flesh – probably because our surnames led us to be placed next to one another on the bookshop shelves. I liked the book immediately and immensely. The writing was measured but pacy, the characters complex, the setting realistically modern and urban. The English crime story, I soon learned, had come a long way from ‘Mayhem Parva’ – Colin Watson’s derogatory term for novels of the Christie school – and Ruth Rendell had done more than any other author to inject life, social commentary and literary ambition into the genre.
By the time Live Flesh appeared, Rendell had more than twenty years’ experience behind her – the first Chief Inspector Wexford novel, From Doon With Death, having been published in 1964. Devouring her back catalogue, I was full of admiration for her boundless imagination and ability to make the flesh creep while engaging the intellect. In Wexford she created a classic cop of the hard-but-fair fraternity, but also gave him a home life with a family who would grow and change with him. This would have been success enough for many writers, but Rendell also penned stand-alone chillers, and increasingly became a chronicler of London’s suburban underbelly, a world Graham Greene would have recognised, just as he would have sympathised with its moral ambiguities and the dilemmas and challenges faced by its denizens. Yet Rendell still wasn’t finished. Writing as ‘Barbara Vine’ she gave her psychodramas more room to breathe, reinvigorating the form once again. This is why Ruth Rendell remains, for me, the crime writer’s crime writer – she is never content to rest on her laurels, but must always be restless, inquisitive and busy. I get the feeling she thinks she is still learning – about human complexity, our foibles and frailties, and the society we have created around us. Her best work – and astonishingly little of her oeuvre falls short of being brilliant – shows us the world anew. She is not content merely to create a satisfying puzzle, but explains how the players involved came to have the lives they do, sometimes leading to their violent demise. There can be no crime without the motivation to carry out that crime, and Rendell is as interested in the reasoning of the perpetrators as in the meticulous and dogged detective work which will bring about justice of sorts. At the end of one of her novels, you never feel cheated by a glib conclusion or some deus ex machina – but there may be questions left for you to linger over, questions to do with morality, society, and human nature.
It is testament to both Rendell’s manifest gifts as a storyteller and the breadth and depth of her work that, asked for their favourite book of hers, a dozen fans might offer up a dozen different titles. Her consistency is breathtaking, and whenever a new book is published I feel the same excitement as when I first read her, because I never know what this latest adventure will bring. Whether Wexford, stand-alone, or ‘Barbara Vine’, all I know is, I’m hearing from an expert witness in the human condition. She has written over sixty full-length novels in her fifty years as a published writer, along with novellas, non-fiction and numerous short stories. She has won the Gold Dagger Award (for the year’s best crime novel) four times, and for my money probably could have won it four more – at least. As a fellow author I am convinced all crime writers owe her a huge debt of gratitude – her example keeps us on our toes, showing that we should never stop honing our craft, never fall back into lazy thinking or easy solutions. At its best, crime fiction tells us about ourselves, opening up our insecurities, making us question the state we’re in both as individuals and as a society. If crime fiction is currently in rude good health, its practitioners striving to better the craft and keep it fresh, vibrant and relevant, this is in no small part thanks to Ruth Rendell.
The crime writer’s crime writer, yes – but the crime fan’s pre-eminent writer, too.
Ian Rankin
March 2014
You have broken my heart. There, I have written it. Not for you to read, Minna, for this letter will never be sent, never shrink and wither under your laughter, little lips prim and pleated, laughter like dulcimer music . . .
Shall I tell you of the Muse who awaited me? I wanted you to walk beside me into her vaulted halls. There were the springs of Helicon! I would furnish you with the food of the soul, the bread that is prose and the wine that is poetry. Ah, the wine, Minna . . . This is the rose-red blood of the troubadour!
Never shall I make that journey, Minna, for when I brought you the wine you returned to me the waters of indifference. I wrapped the bread in gold but you hid my loaves in the crock of contempt.
Truly you have broken my heart and dashed the wine-cup against the wall . . .
Call once yet,
In a voice that she will know:
‘Margaret, Margaret!’
Matthew Arnold, The Forsaken Merman
‘I THINK YOU’RE getting things a bit out of proportion, Mr Parsons,’ Burden said. He was tired and he’d been going to take his wife to the pictures. Besides, the first things he’d noticed when Parsons brought him into the room were the books in the rack by the fireplace. The titles were enough to give the most level-headed man the jitters, quite enough to make a man anxious where no ground for anxiety existed: Palmer the Poisoner, The Trial of Madeleine Smith, Three Drowned Brides, Famous Trials, Notable British Trials.
‘Don’t you think your reading has been preying on your mind?’
‘I’m interested in crime,’ Parsons said. ‘It’s a hobby of mine.’
‘I can see that.’ Burden wasn’t going to sit down if he could avoid it. ‘Look, you can’t say your wife’s actually missing. You’ve been home one and a half hours and she isn’t here. That’s all. She’s probably gone to the pictures. As a matter of fact I’m on my way there now with my wife. I expect we’ll meet her coming out.’
‘Margaret wouldn’t do that, Mr Burden. I know her and you don’t. We’ve been married nearly six years and in all that time I’ve never come home to an empty house.’
‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll drop in on my way back. But you can bet your bottom dollar she’ll be home by then.’ He started moving towards the door. ‘Look, get on to the station if you like. It won’t do any harm.’
‘No, I won’t do that. It was just with you living down the road and being an inspector . . .’
And being off duty, Burden thought. If I was a doctor instead of a policeman I’d be able to have private patients on the side. I bet he wouldn’t be so keen on my services if there was any question of a fee.
Sitting in the half-empty dark cinema he thought: Well, it is funny. Normal ordinary wives as conventional as Mrs Parsons, wives who always have a meal ready for their husbands on the dot of six, don’t suddenly go off without leaving a note.
‘I thought you said this was a good film,’ he whispered to his wife.
‘Well, the critics liked it.’
‘Oh, critics,’ he said.
Another man, that could be it. But Mrs Parsons? Or it could be an accident. He’d been a bit remiss not getting Parsons to phone the station straight away.
‘Look, love,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand this. You stay and see the end. I’ve got to get back to Parsons.’
‘I wish I’d married that reporter who was so keen on me.’
‘You must be joking,’ Burden said. ‘He’d have stayed out all night putting the paper to bed. Or the editor’s secretary.’
He charged up Tabard Road, then made himself stroll when he got to the Victorian house where Parsons lived. It was all in darkness, the curtains in the big bay downstairs undrawn. The step was whitened, the brass kerb above it polished. Mrs Parsons must have been a house-proud woman. Must have been? Why not, still was?
Parsons opened the door before he had a chance to knock. He still looked tidy, neatly dressed in an oldish suit, his tie knotted tight. But his face was greenish grey. It reminded Burden of a drowned face he had once seen on a mortuary slab. They had put the glasses back on the spongy nose to help the girl who had come to identify him.
‘She hasn’t come back,’ he said. His voice sounded as if he had a cold coming. But it was probably only fear.
‘Let’s have a cup of tea,’ Burden said. ‘Have a cup of tea and talk about it.’
‘I keep thinking what could have happened to her. It’s so open round here. I suppose it would be, being country.’
‘It’s those books you read,’ Burden said. ‘It’s not healthy.’ He looked again at the shiny paper covers. On the spine of one was a jumble of guns and knives against a blood-red background. ‘Not for a layman,’ he said. ‘Can I use your phone?’
‘It’s in the front room.’
‘I’ll get on to the station. There might be something from the hospitals.’
The front room looked as if nobody ever sat in it. With some dismay he noted its polished shabbiness. So far he hadn’t seen a stick of furniture that looked less than fifty years old. Burden went into all kinds of houses and he knew antique furniture when he saw it. But this wasn’t antique and nobody could have chosen it because it was beautiful or rare. It was just old. Old enough to be cheap, Burden thought, and at the same time young enough not to be expensive. The kettle whistled and he heard Parsons fumbling with china in the kitchen. A cup crashed on the floor. It sounded as if they had kept the old concrete floor. It was enough to give anyone the creeps, he thought again, sitting in these high-ceilinged rooms, hearing unexplained inexplicable creaks from the stairs and the cupboard, reading about poison and hangings and blood.
‘I’ve reported your wife as missing,’ he said to Parsons. ‘There’s nothing from the hospitals.’
Parsons turned on the light in the back room and Burden followed him in. It must have a weak bulb under the parchment lampshade that hung from the centre of the ceiling. About sixty watts, he thought. The shade forced all the light down, leaving the ceiling, with its plaster decorations of bulbous fruit, dark and in the corners blotched with deeper shadow. Parsons put the cups down on the sideboard, a vast mahogany thing more like a fantastic wooden house than a piece of furniture, with its tiers and galleries and jutting beaded shelves. Burden sat down in a chair with wooden arms and seat of brown corduroy. The lino struck cold through the thick soles of his shoes.
‘Have you any idea at all where your wife could have gone?’
‘I’ve been trying to think. I’ve been racking my brains. I can’t think of anywhere.’
‘What about her friends? Her mother?’
‘Her mother’s dead. We haven’t got any friends here. We only came here six months ago.’
Burden stirred his tea. Outside it had been close, humid. Here in this thick-walled dark place, he supposed, it must always feel like winter.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I don’t like to say this, but somebody’s bound to ask you. It might as well be me. Could she have gone out with some man? I’m sorry, but I had to ask.’
‘Of course you had to ask. I know, it’s all in here.’ He tapped the bookcase. ‘Just routine enquiries, isn’t it? But you’re wrong. Not Margaret. It’s laughable.’ He paused, not laughing. ‘Margaret’s a good woman. She’s a lay preacher at the Wesleyan place down the road.’
No point in pursuing it, Burden thought. Others would ask him, probe into his private life whether he liked it or not, if she still hadn’t got home when the last train came in and the last bus had rolled into Kingsmarkham garage.
‘I suppose you’ve looked all over the house?’ he asked. He had driven down this road twice a day for a year but he couldn’t remember whether the house he was sitting in had two floors or three. His policeman’s brain tried to reassemble the retinal photograph on his policeman’s eye. A bay window at the bottom, two flat sash windows above it and – yes, two smaller ones above that under the slated eyelids of the roof. An ugly house, he thought, ugly and forbidding.
‘I looked in the bedrooms,’ Parsons said. He stopped pacing and hope coloured his cheeks. Fear whitened them again as he said: ‘You think she might be up in the attics? Fainted or something?’
She would hardly still be there if she’d only fainted, Burden thought. A brain haemorrhage, yes, or some sort of accident. ‘Obviously we ought to look,’ he said. ‘I took it for granted you’d looked.’
‘I called out. We hardly ever go up there. The rooms aren’t used.’
‘Come on,’ Burden said.
The light in the hall was even dimmer than the one in the dining-room. The little bulb shed a pallid glow on to a woven pinkish runner, on lino patterned to look like parquet in dark and lighter brown. Parsons went first and Burden followed him up the steep stairs. The house was biggish, but the materials which had been used to build it were poor and the workmanship unskilled. Four doors opened off the first landing and these were panelled but without beading and they looked flimsy. The flat rectangles of plywood in their frames reminded Burden of blind blocked-up windows on the sides of old houses.
‘I’ve looked in the bedrooms,’ Parsons said. ‘Good heavens, she may be lying helpless up there!’
He pointed up the narrow uncarpeted flight and Burden noticed how he had said ‘Good heavens!’ and not ‘God!’ or ‘My God!’ as some men might have done.
‘I’ve just remembered, there aren’t any bulbs in the attic lights.’ Parsons went into the front bedroom and unscrewed the bulb from the central lamp fitting. ‘Mind how you go,’ he said.
It was pitchy dark on the staircase. Burden flung open the door that faced him. By now he was certain they were going to find her sprawled on the floor and he wanted to get the discovery over as soon as possible. All the way up the stairs he’d been anticipating the look on Wexford’s face when he told him she’d been there all along.
A dank coldness breathed out of the attic, a chill mingled with the smell of camphor. The room was partly furnished. Burden could just make out the shape of a bed. Parsons stumbled over to it and stood on the cotton counterpane to fit the bulb into the lamp socket. Like the ones downstairs it gave only an unsatisfactory light, which, streaming faintly through a shade punctured all over with tiny holes, patterned the ceiling and the distempered walls with yellowish dots. The window was uncurtained. A bright cold moon swam into the black square and disappeared again under the scalloped edge of a cloud.
‘She’s not in here,’ Parsons said. His shoes had made dusty footprints on the white stuff that covered the bedstead like a shroud.
Burden lifted a corner of it and looked under the bed, the only piece of furniture in the room.
‘Try the other room,’ he said.
Once more Parsons went through the tedious, maddeningly slow motions of removing the light bulb. Now only the chill radiance from the window lit their way into the second attic. This was smaller and more crowded. Burden opened a cupboard and raised the lids from two trunks. He could see Parsons staring at him, thinking perhaps about what he called his hobby and about the things trunks could contain. But these were full of books, old books of the kind you sometimes see in stands outside second-hand shops.
The cupboard was empty and inside it the paper was peeling from the wall, but there were no spiders. Mrs Parsons was a house-proud woman.
‘It’s half past ten,’ Burden said, squinting at his watch. ‘The last train doesn’t get in till one. She could be on that.’
Parsons said obstinately, ‘She wouldn’t go anywhere by train.’
They went downstairs again, pausing to restore the light bulb to the front bedroom. There was something sinister and creepy about the stair-well that could have been so easily dispelled, Burden thought, by white paint and stronger lights. As they descended he reflected momentarily on this woman and the life she lived here, going fussily about her chores, trying to bring a little smartness to the mud-coloured woodwork, the ugly ridged linoleum.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Parsons said.
Burden didn’t want to go back into the little dining-room with the big furniture, the cold tea-dregs in their two cups. By now Jean would be back from the cinema.
‘You could try phoning round her friends at the church,’ he said, edging towards the front door. If Parsons only knew how many reports they got in of missing women and how few, how tiny a percentage, turned up dead in fields or chopped in trunks . . .
‘At this time of night?’
Parsons looked almost shocked, as if the habits of a lifetime, the rule that you never called on anyone after nine o’clock, mustn’t be broken even in a crisis.
‘Take a couple of aspirins and try to get some sleep,’ Burden said. ‘If anything comes up you can give me a ring. We’ve told the station. We can’t do anything more. They’ll let you know as soon as they hear.’
‘What about tomorrow morning?’
If he’d been a woman, Burden thought, he’d beg me to stay. He’d cling to me and say, Don’t leave me!
‘I’ll look in on my way to the station,’ he said.
Parsons didn’t shut the door until he was half-way up the street. He looked back once and saw the white bewildered face, the faint glow from the hall falling on to the brass step. Then, feeling helpless because he had brought the man no comfort, he raised his hand in a half-wave.
The streets were empty, still with the almost tangible silence of the countryside at night. Perhaps she was at the station now, scuttling guiltily across the platform, down the wooden stairs, gathering together in her mind the threads of the alibi she had concocted. It would have to be good, Burden thought, remembering the man who waited on the knife edge that spanned hope and panic.
It was out of his way, but he went to the corner of Tabard Road and looked up the High Street. From here he could see right up to the beginning of the Stowerton Road where the last cars were leaving the forecourt of The Olive and Dove. The market place was empty, the only people to be seen a pair of lovers standing on the Kingsbrook Bridge. As he watched the Stowerton bus appeared between the Scotch pines on the horizon. It vanished again in the dip beyond the bridge. Hand in hand, the lovers ran to the stop in the centre of the market place as the bus pulled in close against the dismantled cattle stands. Nobody got off. Burden sighed and went home.
‘She hasn’t turned up,’ he said to his wife.
‘It is funny, you know, Mike. I should have said she was the last person to go off with some man.’
‘Not much to look at?’